ziarek - art and machenschaft on heidegger

8/18/2019 Ziarek - Art and Machenschaft on Heidegger

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175Contretemps 3, July 2002

Krzysztof Ziarek

Art, Power, and Politics: Heidegger on Machenschaft and Poiêsis

At the end of the 20th century, after several years of the prominence of culturaldiscourses which approach art as one of the many various sectors of cultural activity,it is becoming evident that the question of aesthetics will have to be reassessed onceagain. Terms such as ‘aesthetics’ and ‘beauty’ seem to be regaining currency after beingvirtually discredited in analyses which made power, politics, institution, and ideologythe focus of their conceptual apparatus. This return is a symptom of the insufficiency ofthe cultural-political conception of art prevalent in its diverse forms in cultural studies,New Historicism, or Foucauldian analyses of institutions and power formations.While I fully appreciate what these approaches make available in terms of art’sinstitutional ramifications and its entanglements in the power formations operative in

various historical and cultural contexts, they tend to posit an equivalence or completeconvertibility between the aesthetic and the social, excluding a priori the possibilityof an artistic force specific to art. The explanation of art in terms of the ideology ofaesthetics assumes that art, while not powerless in relation to historical, political, andsocial forces, operates and remains in essence explicable in the same terms as these‘external’ and non-artistic forces. While the ideology of the aesthetic has exposed theproblems with ‘formalist’ aesthetics and sought to overcome them, it seems to haveoverlooked in the process something crucial about art, which now returns to hauntcultural critiques in the guise of to demand to rethink aesthetics yet again. The simplifiedpolarization into ‘materialist’ and ‘formalist’ aesthetics—I am using these terms verybroadly—appears too narrow for thinking about art, no longer sufficient to respond to

the complexity of the question about how art works. The opposition between ‘politicallycharged’ ideology of the aesthetic and the apparently vacuous, self-indulgent formalisticplay oblivious to the demands of reality has become a cliché , one that, in fact, wasvery forcefully called into question some time ago by Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.Notwithstanding important differences between the various orientations mentioned

above, they tend to inscribe art under one of the two possible rubrics: art is either

oppositional, contestatory, or transgressive in relation to the socio-historical order in

which it originates or it remains complicit with it. Art ’s complicity, in turn, can beeither ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’, which means that art can explicitly reproduce and


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endorse the status quo or, seeming to escape the political reality of power relationsinto aestheticized fancy, still remain in collusion with the powers that be by virtue of

artworks’ indifference to ‘real life’ concerns.Whichever approach one takes, what remains unquestioned is the translatability of

art into the order of ‘other’ forces: economic, political, historical, etc., which underliesa broadly conceived cultural way of thinking about art. Art is understood in terms of

power, ideology, institution, that is, terms that are defined apart or independently from

art, and then used to show how art remains inescapably dependent on them. This logic

locks us a priori into the contestation between cultural-materialist conceptions and

formalist-aestheticist ones. What is more important, as Adorno already pointed out,1

while this logic inscribes into the aesthetic ideology stance a healthy mistrust of art ’s

aestheticizing power, it also produces a certain kind of allergy to art, an intoleranceof art’s otherness, and, in particular, of the very idea that art could operate in termsof forces that would not be translatable into the parameters of political and cultural

discourses and, thus, would not function as extensions of forces operating in society at

large. Formalism’s lofty dismissal of non-aesthetic interests in art becomes reversed intothe culturalist suspicion of anything that appears autonomous in artworks. This allergy

manifests itself in the assumption that art can be comfortably explained in historical,

material, or cultural categories, and, what is more important, in the widespread view

that it is perfectly sufficient to analyze art in terms of such a cultural aesthetic to account

fully for how art works. A suggestion that there is something else in art, an other force

that does not fit into either the formalist or the culturalist-historicist categories, gets

dismissed on principle as a reprehensible or naive aestheticizing. In its most recalcitrantversions, such dismissal seems to be an attempt to foreclose the problem of art, that

is, to disallow art as a question that could disturb the very terms in which one tries to

conceive not only artworks but also the reality ‘beyond’ art. The answer to this problemwill certainly not be found in a return to aesthetics or in a pluralization of the concept

of the beautiful, which would simply validate the existing multiple perspectives without

rethinking the concept of the aesthetic. Instead, we need to rethink the possibility that

art does not exhaust itself in the opposition between aesthetic formalism and cultural

materialism, and that art’s ‘otherness’ lies in its ability to unfold a mode of relationalitythat changes the very terms on which we encounter art.

On other occasions,2 I have described this force of art, irreducible to power relations

aesthetic experience, or commodity function, in terms of a poietics which would haveto be distinguished from both formalist approaches and the ideology of the aesthetic.

More than any other contemporary thinker, Heidegger, from whose critique of aesthetics

I have adapted this term ‘poietics’, opens the door to such a ‘third’ approach. But toclarify this approach, we have to understand the relation between this poietics and the

radical critique of power which Heidegger initiates in the 1930s in the aftermath

of his reading of Nietzsche, a critique that has not been given enough attention in

the Heidegger scholarship, even in the most recent books on the question of politics

in Heidegger’s thought. We need to understand how the poietic approach to art is


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predicated upon the critique of power and the rethinking of the ‘political’ meaning ofart within the destructuring of metaphysics. Against the backdrop of his critique ofmetaphysics in terms of Machenschaft , or manipulative power, it is possible to see

how Heidegger’s thinking on art evolves away from aesthetics and into poietics, inan attempt to mark, within the global technics characteristic of modernity, the fold of

poiêsis as an alternative modality of relation. The question of the critique of aesthetics,that is, of poetry, language, and art which Heidegger proposes to rethink in the 1950s

in terms of a poietics alternative to technics, makes sense only within the broader

perspective of Heidegger’s attempt to think being into its other beginning within whichrelationality would no longer be operative in terms of power. In turn, the question of

power and politics in Heidegger cannot be understood without a rigorous reading of the

role that poetry and poetic thinking come to play in opening experience to its historicity.We have to keep questioning art in relation to power, to ask how art is productive of

power in the subjective and objective sense of this genitive, that is, produced both

through and as power. But it is also necessary to question power through art. What

has for years misled the Frankfurt School and Habermas into judging Heidegger ’sdiscourse on poetry as both esoteric and indifferent to political issues is their inability to

recognize in them an attempt to think being otherwise than power, or, in terms proposed

by Besinnung, as Macht-los or power-free. It is the link between the critique of being

as Macht (power) and the rethinking of poiêsis that opens the possibility of power-freerelationality and propels the discussion of art beyond the oppositions between formalism

and materialism, aestheticism and ideology, beauty and power.

Especially with the recent publication of Besinnung and Die Geschichte des Seyns, ithas become clear how central the question of power and its critique are to Heidegger’sdestructuring of metaphysics and, subsequently, to his rethinking of technology,

language, and poetry in the 1940s and 50s. In those two texts, dating respectively from

1939-1940 and 1938-1940, Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s will to power leads him todiagnose metaphysics as the historical unfolding of power’s drive toward overpowering(Ü bermächtigung). Heidegger’s characterization of power in those texts anticipates and,in some aspects, even goes beyond Foucault’s later formulation of power in Discipline andPunish and History of Sexuality. For Heidegger, power is not just domination or ordering

but it is also constructive and creative.3 Rather than being external to other relations, power

flows through all relations and, in fact, determines the very shape, modality, and valency

of relating; in other words, power unfolds, tunes (stimmt ) and determines (bestimmt ),the site of all relationality. Like in Foucault, power operates in terms of calculability

( Berechenbarkeit ), as a form of calculating ( Rechnen) broadly understood in reference to

the manageability and fabricability intrinsic to being.4 For Heidegger, modern technics

reveals being as inherently calculable, i.e. graspable, manipulable, and makeable in its

essence. It is on the basis of this intrinsic calculability constitutive of all relationality that

being becomes calculable both in mathematical/scientific way and in terms of cultural

values.5 Foucault’s reformulation of the concept of power in terms of force relations isoften regarded as a step beyond metaphysics, a departure from the idea that power means


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primarily domination and that it functions like a property or an attribute that could bepossessed or exercised. Die Geschichte des Seyns characterizes power in much the same

terms: “Power needs no bearer, because being is never carried by beings but, on thecontrary, beings become empowered into themselves by being, that is, power” and“Power suffers no possessor.”6 What is different is that Heidegger suggests that to seepower in terms of fluid, often productive relations among forces does not amount to a

non- or post-metaphysical perspective; it only allows us to see the operation of the still

‘metaphysical’ disposition of being as power.For Heidegger, metaphysics is not just a conceptual system of binary oppositions:

presence and absence, subjectivity and objectivity, activity and passivity, but signifies

a manner of unfolding relations into power, power that produces and runs through, in

short, powers, the oppositional structuring of experience: “The essence of power asmanipulative power annihilates the possibility of the truth of beings. It is itself the end ofmetaphysics” (“Das Wesen der Macht als Machenschaft vernichtet die Möglichkeit derWahrheit des Seienden. Sie ist selbst das Ende der Metaphysik.”7) It is the occurring ofbeing into and as power that constitutes history as metaphysical; or, to put it differently,

as long as being occurs in terms of power, there is metaphysics. Metaphysics means

that being unfolds into makingness ( Mache): “The essencing of this makingness ismanipulative power [ Machenschaft ]: the preparing for the empowering of power

and the makesomeness [or powersomeness] of all beings readied by this power and

predemanded by the overpowering.”8 To recognize the fluid operations of poweras the intrinsic powersomeness of being, that is, as the power-oriented unfolding

of what is, constitutes only the first critical step in the direction of initiating theother beginning of being in the midst of metaphysics: the unfolding of being as a

relationality free from power.

In view of Besinnung and Die Geschichte des Seyns, which develop the critique of

power and totalitarianism outlined in Beitr äge zur Philosophie, it becomes clear thatHeidegger’s thinking in the late 1930s, far from philosophically supporting NationalSocialism, produces a stringent and forceful critique of modernity as the epoch in

which being unfolds into Machenschaft and total war (der totale Krieg). In the midst of

the intensification of modern being as production or makingness ( Mache)9 and power

( Macht ), Heidegger attempts to initiate the other thinking and the other beginning, in

which being would unfold as power-free ( Machtlos), that is, with the force of what

Heidegger calls the mildness of binding, a relating whose ‘force’ comes preciselyfrom freedom from violence (Gewalt ), power ( Macht ), and compulsion ( Zwang). Whatthis other beginning indicates is the possibility of transformation in the modality of

being from that of physis or emergence ( Aufgang) to that of Ereignis or event. The

first beginning refers to the rise of philosophy in ancient Greece and its understanding

of being as physis, which has historically led to the dominance of metaphysics, in

accordance with which being occurs as makingness ( Mache) and operates in terms of

power ( Macht ). The other beginning is the breaking open, in the midst of the modern

intensification of power into total war, of what I have called in Powers to Be the


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alternative disposition of being: the event in which being does not produce itself aspower but occurs in its power-free (machtlos) historicity.

The other beginning which Heidegger thinks in terms of his critique of power

has to be elaborated in relation to futurity and decisioning ( Ent-scheidung). What

Heidegger means by beginning ( Anfang) is not a historically marked instance of change

or fulfillment; it is not a historical localizable moment of transformation or overcoming

of what has been.10 Rather, the beginning refers to the way in which being, in each

moment of unfolding, breaks open into relationality. This breaking open marks the ‘otherbeginning’ only if the relationality of beings reveals its historicity, where historicitymeans not the specificity of a particular location within historical development but the

intrinsically futural, possibility-oriented, and power-free giving of the event. The other

beginning ‘begins’ nothing, it does not change any beings, but it does carry being intoa different disposition of relations: changing ‘nothing’ (i.e. being), it affects everything.The way being carries into relationality, disposing and determining relations among

beings, can either open history as a space of decisioning or foreclose it into the play of

power. Heidegger’s term Entscheidung has been read, in particular with reference tohis support for National Socialism in the rectoral address, as a literal call to deciding, to

making a (political) decision and sticking with it. In Die Geschichte des Seyns, however,

the term is much closer to Derrida’s sense of (un)decidability and would be betterrendered as de-cisioning: Entscheidung refers to holding being open as the time-space

of deciding, against the pressure of rendering all that is in terms of power. Heidegger

thinks that when being transpires as manipulative power or Machenschaft , it does not

even accede to the space of decision. While we may and, in fact, do make a host ofdecisions on the ontic level, the ‘meaning’ of being has already been decided on theontological level: being means power as Machenschaft , and to continue participating

in being as it is becomes equivalent to remaining metaphysically decisionless, to

participating in the intensification, or the overpowering (Ü bermächtigung) of power. Itis obvious that to equate this notion of the other beginning with the National Socialist

revolution in Hitler’s Germany or with Germany’s imperialist conquest of Europe,as some commentators attempt to do, is to deliberately misrepresent the critical

thrust of Heidegger’s thought against power and totalitarianism, evident at leastsince the 1936 Beitr äge.

In the reading I am proposing here, there is something much more important at stake

than simply intellectual rigour and fairness to Heidegger’s evolving thought, namely,the relation between being and power, which has gained so much currency thanks toFoucaul’s work. Beitr äge, Besinnung, and Die Geschichte des Seyns make it clear thatit is precisely Heidegger’s need to call into question his engagement with NationalSocialism, his mistaken hope that National Socialism—obviously in his own version,which still needs to be better understood, rather than the one motivated by racism,

anti-Semitism, and imperialismCmight be associated with the possibility of a change in

being, that gives impetus to his thinking in the late 1930s and into the 1940s. By the time

of Besinnung, when Heidegger holds that any nationalism, socialism or totalitarianism


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does not overcome or even confront metaphysics but produces itself as the culminationof the metaphysical constitution of being in terms of power, his thinking indeed takes a

critical turn. Just as it is important to understand how Heidegger’s thought modifies itselffrom Being and Time in an attempt to draw a parallel in 1933 between the questioning

of being and National Socialism, and how his later critique of totalitarianism operates

on the ‘ontological’, not cultural or political level, it is also crucial to follow the turnfrom the thinking of being in terms of power ( Macht or Gewalt ) to the possibility of

another beginning: of being as power-free. This turn is quite dramatic if one compares

Besinnung to Introduction to Metaphysics. The 1936 Introduction to Metaphysics

presents the issue of decisioning within the terms and with the tenor that are much

closer to Nietzsche, as Heidegger describes the unfolding of being as power ( Macht )

and violence (Gewalt ). Those are precisely the concepts that Besinnung critiques in anattempt to distance the other thinking not only from violent force, coercion, etc. but from

the very idea of being as Machenschaft , as manipulative power.

In Besinnung, Heidegger makes an emphatic statement that being occurs beyond

power and powerlessness: “ausserhalb von Macht und Ohnmacht west das Seyn” (“being occurs beyond power and powerlessness”).11 Heidegger insists on the possibilityof a relationality in which power does not course—a possibility toward which weneed to question. Equating metaphysics with power, Heidegger introduces a crucial

distinction between Ohnmacht , or powerlessness, and das Machtlose, which I translate

here as the power-free. Although machtlos means literally power-less (macht-los),

Heidegger clearly distances it from powerlessness (Ohnmacht ), from having no

power. Powerlessness operates as part of the dynamic of power, and the opposition Macht — Ohnmacht is a metaphysical categorization of power in terms of its presenceor absence. By contrast, das Machtlose becomes related to loslassen, to releasing or

letting free, and indicates a relationality that is power free, otherwise than power:

“Seyn—das Machtlose, jenseits von Macht und Unmacht , besser ausserseits von Machtund Unmacht, wesenhaft unbezogen auf Solches,” “Being—the powerfree, beyond

power and unpower , better yet, outside of power and unpower, essentially unrelated

to them,” that is, unrelated to the opposites of power and its absence (Unmacht ).12 Thepower-free occurs beyond the opposition between power and absence of power. It is

also not a counter-power, which, like power and powerlessness, still operates within

the same domain of the intensification of power. Heidegger makes it clear that being as

power-free is not powerless. It has the force of letting-be that is otherwise than power,that is, the force that, as Letter on Humanism and Heidegger’s later texts on poetryand language make amply clear, has a certain ethical resonance. Taking issue with

the Hobbesian idea of being as war and primary violence, Heidegger insists on the

possibility of a ‘transformation’ in being into a non-violent and power-free relationality.For Heidegger, power and violence mark the erasure of the originary non-violent

disposition of relations, which produces the formation of relationality into power.

This power-free disposition has a broad ethical force, not unrelated to though also

not identical to what Levinas articulates in the context of the face of the other as an


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injunction which paralyzes and undoes the very power to have power.13

The otherbeginning does not denote the start of a new epoch, the dawn of a new power formation,

but, rather, points to the breaking open, in the midst of power relations, of a power-free

relationality, of a kind of a power-free margin internal to the formation of being into

power. This other beginning has to ‘begin’ or break open each moment anew; it cannotbe formed into a political orientation or articulated into forms of power. It can only

begin being otherwise than power, to modify the well known Levinasian phrase.

If being in metaphysics produces/makes itself as makesomeness ( Machsamkeit )

and, therefore, as power, then the Levinasian ‘otherwise than being’ rings a note ofproximity to das Machtlose: the power-free occurs otherwise than power, otherwise

than being (as power).

As Heidegger suggests in Die Geschichte des Seyns, the difference between thepower-free historicity that ‘begins’ being and power is a matter of politics. Heideggerredefines the notion of the political broadly in terms of the disposition of relations:

“‘Politics’ is no longer a separated domain of human acting but has taken over the alldetermining managing and supplying of humanity in the midst of beings.”14 Only whenpolitics is experienced from the occurring of beings, and not as a particular domain of

human activity, will the essence of power as the unconditional empowering of power

become visible. In other words, what depends on the redefinition of politics is the

possibility of understanding how power courses through beings, how it operates on

the levels that are ‘normally’ not considered political. What emerges with this changeof the political optics and the recognition of the overpowering drive of power, is the

possibility of a different politics, that is, of an alternative disposition of relations thattranspires otherwise than power. Heidegger’s text points to two domains of the political:one that is power-free and the other that organizes relations in terms of power,

producing what is ordinarily understood by politics. For Heidegger, politics in its

metaphysical sense is essentially implicated within the power’s drive toward itsown overpowering. As different as various political options are in practical and

ideological terms, metaphysically, they participate in and produce the ‘eternal returnof the same’: being as power.

I would suggest that this distinction between politics as power and politics as das

Machtlose, brought into play on the level of the disposition of force relations, of how

beings ‘begin’ or carry into relations, makes it possible to revise the link between power,

politics, and art; and to revise it in terms that eschew the materialist/formalist and theideological/aestheticist polarization. These new, poietic terms also lead the problematic

of art beyond the confines of aesthetic conceptuality. But to make this connection, we

have to rethink what Heidegger writes about power and metaphysics in the late 1930s

through his texts on technology, poetry, and language from the 1950s. In Besinnung,

Heidegger is very critical of art, seeing in aesthetics and the idea of beauty the realization

of the metaphysical empowering of power. In Die Geschichte des Seyns, Heidegger

identifies Mache, the makingness, whose characteristic modern manifestation is

manipulative power, with poiêsis. Poiêsis refers to making in the broadest sense, and


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such making remains intrinsically linked with power: Mache describes and empowersthe flow of Macht through beings; it designates the way beings are, i.e. the power-formed

modalities of their being. In the 1950s, however, there is a marked shift in Heidegger’sthinking of poiêsis, one that returns in part to the formulation of poiêsis in The Originof the Work of Ar t. In The Question Concerning Technology, poiêsis refers to a modeof revealing ( Entbergung), and is not only no longer equated with making or power but

counterposed to them. As such, poiêsis describes the event which disposes relationsin a power-free manner. It is juxtaposed with the notion of technics (Technik ), which

becomes Heidegger’s term for modern operations of power, the contemporary version of Machenschaft which conceals its manipulative and calculative drive in the exhilarating

sense of the new, of technical innovations and improvements. By contrast with the

organizing and formative direction of technics, the poiêsis of being is neither power-fulnor power-less (without power).This revision of poiêsis makes it possible to rethink art in terms of the difference

between disposition of relations into power and into the power-free letting-be. Even

though on the ideological level or from the perspective of pragmatic politics Heidegger’stexts indeed appear to be ‘disengaged’, on the historico-metaphysical level they clearlytry to open an alternative relationality between forces, signaled in the term Gelassenheit .

Gelassenheit can be explained as a sheaf of modalities of lassen, or of letting, where

letting designates the mode of relation between human beings and being. In Besinnung,

Heidegger remarks that letting is neither indifference nor not-doing15 but refers to

bringing about a change (Verwandlung) in how being occurs. Gelassenheit requires

enduring in the historico-temporal event of being without letting being collapse into‘graspable’ beings, into entities and objects. Such enduring is the ‘grounding’ inwhich being becomes transformed from the metaphysical essencing into power into

a relationality of lettingness. ‘Grounding’ is another frequently misunderstood term:for Heidegger, grounding is always an abyss ( Abgrund ), which ‘ungrounds’ and,taking the ground away from under our ‘metaphysical’ footing, it lets being transform(verwandeln). Lettingness is neither simply a human act nor a fate that humans accept

and allow to be. Rather, letting has to be conceived in the middle voice beyond activity

and passivity, the middle voice into which relations can be let. This letting, while not

entirely at human disposition or will, needs to be worked on. If we dwell for a moment

on the phrase that I just used to comment on ‘grounding’: “it lets being transform,” we

can see that this remark tries to reflect the middle voice of lassen in Heidegger’stexts: human beings can let being transform. Lassen does not mean that humanstransform being, that they enforce or make this transformation. Rather, it indicates

that being transforms itself but cannot do so ‘on its own’, without human engagement,without human letting.

This is a critical and much misunderstood moment in Heidegger’s thought. IfGelassenheit were a matter of human act, it would be a result of human will, which

means that being would still be a matter of willing and, thus, of power. The change

would have been ‘powered’ through or compelled, and, therefore, would not constitute


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a transformation in being: not the other beginning but still an ontic change. This is notto underestimate the importance of ontic changes and differences, only to clarify on

which level Heidegger locates the transformative force of Gelassenheit . The fact that

Gelassenheit is not a result of a wilful act does not mean that it is a gift of fate, since

it requires human attentiveness and activity: it is what calls for thinking, what needs

thinking to come into being. Without thinking, in the specific Heideggerian sense of

an active comportment and relation toward what is, there is no Gelassenheit . Against

the view held by the Frankfurt School and many of Heidegger’s Marxists critics,Gelassenheit is not an esoteric or aestheticist poetics; it is a poietics that is political,

that concerns power. It engages a poietic mode of relationality that would break open in

the midst of the intensification of power. This is why Gelassenheit needs to be thought

as macht-los, as power-free. One has to remember that the German term lassen has theforce of making or getting something done but it is the force that, in Heidegger, unfolds

without manipulating, fabricating, or ordering: otherwise than power.

Because the poietic disposition or relationality happens otherwise than power,

beyond power and/or powerlessness, it ‘resists’ and ‘contests’ power in a radical sense,that is, it ‘opposes’ not just this or that articulation of power or power formation butthe very constitution of relating as power. What is ‘radical’ about this par excellencetransformative disposition (Stimmung) of forces is the possibility of a shift in the very

nature of relationality, a change of an entirely different order, as it were, than changes

within the (metaphysical) relationality of being as power. While the latter changes may

alter the balance, the circulation, or even the meaning of power, they do not resist or call

into question power as such. Even though such changes are often very significant bothethically and politically, they reconstitute, metaphysically speaking, being as power.

The verbs resist , contest , or oppose used here are ultimately inadequate for describing

Gelassenheit ’s relation to power, because they are intelligible only within being thatunfolds into power. Still, I use them to accentuate the crucial point that the power-free,

i.e. poietic, disposition of force relations ‘counters’ power not by changing its balance,form, or makeup but by foregoing, letting free of power in the first place. In this account,

what flashes in the historicity of the event is the poietic force of power-free being. This

force unfolds or lets be without making, calculating, or fleshing into power. It traces

itself in a twofold manner: on the one hand, as the fragile trace of freedom—freedomwhich remains ‘anterior’ to freedoms and rights of a subject or a person—already erased

and forgotten by the power formation of being, and, on the other hand, as the silentfutural force of transformativity. In art, this twofold trace of poiêsis keeps being effacedby the powers of desire, ideology, and commodification. But in this disappearance, the

poietic historicity of the work of art can, nevertheless, get forces redisposed and call into

question the aesthetic and ideological significations of art.

What is important to our rethinking of the relation between art and power, is the fact

that this ‘power-free’ poiêsis, though not limited to art, may constitute art’s distinctivemark, a mark that is forceful, not powerless, even though it measures ‘nothing’ on thescale of power. Within this perspective, it is possible to argue that art, when it happens


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to be poietic, however seldom that might be the case—and Heidegger thinks it is indeedextremely rare that artworks are encountered in a manner that is poietic—is irreducibleto its aesthetic, ideological, or commodity functions; in fact, it manages not to be a

matter of power. On those occasions, art is political in a non-ideological sense, in a

manner that remains inaccessible to cultural discourse, just as much as it has been

concealed to philosophico-metaphysical thought and to aesthetics. More important, art

is then political precisely because it disposes forces otherwise than power, not only

escaping the categories of aesthetics and the politics of ideology but also ‘resisting’ theformation of being into power—there seems to be a profound congruence on this pointbetween Heidegger and Adorno, despite their many differences.

Following Heidegger’s work, one can distinguish between the ideological/

metaphysical understanding of politics, operative always already within the unfoldingof being as power, and what might be called the other politics, where at issue is whether

being occurs as power or otherwise than power. Within metaphysics, what decides

the political significance of art is how artworks comport themselves toward the power

formations in which they exist, whether they resist or remain complicit with

them. In Heideggerian terms, though, this approach already encloses art within the

metaphysically proscribed domain of aesthetics, which functions and remains intelligible

in terms of power and in relation to politics understood as ideology. We owe the clarity

with which we can see those relations between aesthetics and power at least in part

to Marxist criticism and cultural discourses. But when we look at art otherwise than

in metaphysical and aesthetic terms, what emerges vis-à-vis technics is art’s poietic

significance, that is, the force with which art calls into question the power modalitiesof being. This sense of the other politics of art remains inaccessible as long as we do

not think power on the level of the disposition of relations, in the manner that we have

learned from Foucault, but with the understanding that circulation of power remains

essentially metaphysical. To the extent that artworks may sometimes afford us an

‘experience’ of a relationality that remains power-free, and thus let us into the other,poietic beginning of being, art may reveal itself as both critical of politics and

politically transformative.

Krzysztof Ziarek

University of Notre Dame

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Australian Society for Continental

Philosophy, November 22-24, 2000, at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.


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Notes

1. “With the continuing organization of all cultural spheres the desire grows to assign art its placein society theoretically and indeed practically... Once art has been recognized as a social fact, thesociological definition of its context considers itself superior to it and disposes over it... Suchendeavors themselves call for social criticism. They tacitly seek the primacy of administration,of the administered world even over what refuses to be grasped by total socialization or at anyrate struggles against it.” Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998) 250.2. See “After Aesthetics: Heidegger and Benjamin on Art and Experience,” Philosophy Today 41.1(1997): 199-208, and “Powers to Be: Art and Technology in Heidegger and Foucault,” Researchin Phenomenology 28 (1998).3. “Die Macht ist als Übermächtigung stets vorausbauend—(“konstruktiv”).” Martin Heidegger,

Die Geschichte des Seyns, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 69 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,1998) 64.4. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns 202. In the first volume of History of Sexuality, Foucaultremarks that power relations “are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no powerthat is exercised without a series and objectives.” Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. RobertHurley (New York: Vintage, 1990) 95.5. From the 1920s, Heidegger’s work remains critical of thinking in terms of values, becausevalues reduce the spatio-temporal play of being to a certain calculus, to what can be graspedand measured as a value: “When the meaninglessness [of being] completes itself, the ‘values’ (life and cultural values) are invoked as the highest aims and goals of man.” Heidegger, DieGeschichte des Seyns 201.6.“Die Macht bedarf keiner Träger, weil das Sein niemals vom Seinenden getragen, sondern höchstensumgekehrt das Seiende zu ihm selbst durch das Sein, d.h. die Macht durchmachtet wird.” Heidegger,

Die Geschichte des Seyns 63, and “Die Macht dulded keine Besitzenden” 195.7. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns 71.8. “Das Wesende dieser Mache ist die Machenschaft : das Sicheinrichten auf die Ermächtigung derMacht und die von dieser vorgerichtete weil aus der Übermächtigung vorgefordete Machsamkeitalles Seienden.” Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns 186.9. Mache refers colloquially to make-believe and show, to a certain pretense. Describing themetaphysical materializations of being as Mache, Heidegger signals their intrinsic concealment anddeceptivess, their tendency to hide their own power-character.110. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns 29.11. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997) 84.12. Heidegger, Besinnung B 187-188.13. “...paralyse le pouvoir même de pouvoir.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totalit é et Infini: Essai surl‘exteriorit é (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961) 173, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) 198. In Levinas, such an injunction comes from ‘beyond being’, but thisis because Levinas holds to the metaphysical notion of being, specifically its Hobbesian interpretationas war: “We do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war tophilosophical thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but as the very patency,or the truth, of the real.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity 21. Heidegger’s reformulation of Sein intoSeyn can be seen as a counter to Hobbes and as a reinterpretation of Heraclitean polemos as anon-violent strife of disposition. Such a disposition gets its force from the historiality of being,from the futural form of relationality.14. “...‘Politik ’ nicht mehr ein abgesonderter Bezirk menschlischen Tuns ist, sondern die allesbestimmende Lenkung und Versorgung eines Menschentums innerhalb des Seienden übernommenhat.” Heidegger, Besinnung 188.

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